Death is close enough at hand so we do not need to be afraid of life.

Wherever primitive man put up a word, he believed he had made a discovery. How utterly mistaken he really was! He had touched a problem, and while supposing he had solved it, he had created and obstacle to its solution. Now, with every new knowledge we stumble over flint-like and petrified words and, in so doing, break a leg sooner than a word.

Never to read another book that was born and baptized (with ink) at the same time.

What makes us heroic?--Confronting simultaneously our supreme suffering and our supreme hope.

Intoxicating joy is it for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and forget himself. Intoxicating joy and self-forgetting, did the world once seem to me.

Once we have found ourselves, we must understand how from time to time to lose--and then to find--ourselves once again: assuming,that is, that we are thinkers. For a thinker it is a drawback to be bound to a single person all the time.

He who denies himself much in great matters will readily indulge himself in small things.